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Two successful entrepreneurs talk about manufacturing, lean principles, and the freedom they are pursuing in life and business.
episode 92
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Today's episode will be a little bit shorter. Jay ended up not being able to hop on and record, but I had a bunch of notes 'cause I was gonna give a bunch of updates on our Matsuura. So it actually worked out just fine 'cause you get a solo episode. Matsuura update and Jay will be back next week. So, uh, he did actually send me a few questions.
He was curious why I picked the MX over the MAM series. Wanted to know what kinds of tool holders we had selected for this machine. How we were deciding which parts would get moved from our brothers onto the mx. ::So I'll go through those questions first, give you a little bit of background on our overall thought process on making this leap forward into palletized five axis, and then talk about a few other things that have been going on with our company [00:01:00] recently.
So why the MX over the MAM series? We did have both quoted. The MAM is obviously 32 pallets, 330 plus tools. It has a cool tail stock option so you can machine at 90 and have the end of a long tombstone be fully supported. Really cool stuff. But for what we were doing, we didn't need 330 tools. We didn't need 32 pallets, and the MAM is considerably more expensive than the mx.
I really liked the very open layout of the MX PC 10 pallet pool. You can see all the pallets all at once. Things in the MAM pool. They having walked around those machines a bunch, things kind of get lost inside the tower. In my mind, I'm sure we would figure out how to work around that. But for what we wanted to do initially, the MX allowed us to do everything we wanted.
Go five axis work on lights out production, have standard setups available. Be able to mix and match, start and stop [00:02:00] jobs without tearing setups down. And with 90 tools it allowed us to have standard steel tools and standard aluminum tools in the machine all at once and not be having to swap tool holders in and out to change different jobs with different materials.
So speaking of tool holders, most of what we have in the MX right now is a mix of MA tool and regal fix power grip. So we're using MA tool for pretty basic stuff, drills and taps, things that are not super. High precision, not heavy roughing. And then we've got power grip for everything that is roughing, finishing, milling, and anything particularly precision.
Those like really small carbide drills and stuff. We put in power grip probably. Obviously power grip holders are, they're very rigid, they have great centricity. They're easy and quick to load and unload. I know Dylan at Prote has commented on this before, that he didn't really fully understand until he had the system.
How important shank tolerance and actual shank length were that you have to have cots with the correct amount of ripping surface for [00:03:00] your available shank length. 'cause if you short insert a tool and it doesn't fill the full Colette and then you set it in the power grip machine, you can damage the Colette and make it so that it won't correctly hold a longer shanked tool after that.
Anyway, our experience with Power Grip has been super positive. We have power grip holders on a number of our brothers now as well. We made that decision before we actually placed the order for our Matsuura. We knew that we were gonna be getting into a five access machine in the fall. At IMTS. We were narrowing down the field at just a couple of brands, just a couple of machine models, and we made the decision in the, in September to get power Grip and start using it on our brothers before we'd even made the final decision on which five Axis machine to use.
Because it made sense if we're gonna get into this system to have it across multiple machines for critical tools and get some BT 30 holders as well and those can move around any brother we need them in. So really a nice tooling option for any one of our BT 30 [00:04:00] machines, which has been great.
We've put a couple of Rigo fix holders in each of our production R four fifties that we use for holster. Shell making. We've got. A bunch of rego fix stuff in our R six 50, which has a T 200 Rotary on each table. We use that for OOEM, metal parts production. And then we've got a bunch of rego fix stuff in one of our Speedos that we're currently doing.
Small injection mold work and smaller machine parts. And the only machine I don't have any rego fix in is our really bare bones speedo. That is for dry machining plastics only. And I'm the primary user of that machine for prototyping and proving out things and trying out new tool pads and pro mostly prototyping.
But that since we're only cutting plastic in it every once in a while, little bit of aluminum, but not much. I have some chunks. I've got some Maori tool. I've got a little bit of nick, and I've got basically a smores board of all the tools I've tried before. But for the things we're running all the time, the machines that are making metal parts regularly.
Rico Fixx has been a really nice addition and it made [00:05:00] sense to invest in the nice automatic press, not the manual pump version. So we have the press and a bunch of holders. We have tool carts for standard metal tools and for plastic tools. And then obviously a separate tool cart for the mx. And then he asked how do we decide which parts to run on the brother versus the mx?
All the new production work that we're developing or we're quoting currently is gonna go to the MX first. Even if the parts don't require five axis, just the ability to have them fixed it and run them unattended, run them in the evening on the MX means we're gonna prioritize filling that machine up as much as we can.
Existing jobs, especially if they're low volume with their run very occasionally, and we already have work holding or Pearson pallets or other things made for them. Low frequency, low volume stuff that already runs well on brothers is gonna stay on the brothers for now. It could move to the MX in the future if we need to, but we're not trying to go back and re fixture things.
You know, if it's not [00:06:00] broken, don't refre fixture it. And if there are things where we don't really need to run, it lights out. The volume is low enough for the parts are fast enough that being able to run into the evening isn't even really a thing for those jobs, then there is little upside to us doing the extra work.
Of re *fixturing those to put them on the mx. One of the things I was most excited about getting into five axis is the ability for us to dramatically increase our speed in prototyping new ideas in metal. Whether you're using window frame tapped work, holding the ability to have a chunk of material and work on a complex, multi-sided part that would otherwise require several setups, machining soft jaws, whatever.*
*To be able to just do that in one and test out the idea really excites me because I've said on the pod before, and I say to my employees, often, speed is a superpower and if you have speed not that you're, not, that you're rushing, but you can get things done sooner, that gives you *[00:07:00] *more options. And the ability to iterate without having to recut more soft jaws and reprogram multiple setups.*
*Just one setup, container method, standard stock goes in there in a vice and you do all your work and you tab it off, snap it off, clean those tabs up on a grinder, and you can test the part that is amazing. And the ability to switch back and forth between prototyping setups and production setups without tearing things down on the machine.*
*Just change pallets and off you go. Also means that we can fit in that prototyping anywhere. We can fit in a prototype in the middle of a production job*. *And the only disruption is the cycle time of the prototype. No setup change, no nothing. I need 15 minutes to run this prototype part. I'm just gonna schedule it in the middle of this production job, you know, we'll run pallet 2, 3, 4, then skip the pallet nine, run the prototype, and then skip back to pallet 5, 6, 7 and finish the production run.*
That is amazing. And we've been, we don't [00:08:00] have all 10 pallet places full. We haven't filled all of them yet, but we did put HWR plates on all of them so we can swap out 52 or 96 millimeter vices the Pearson Rotor device and other kinds of fixtures we wanna build. Things can just go on and off there.
So we're leaving the Matsuura bases, which are basically a capto. In the pallet pool, we could buy spares of those and change those up, but those are actually pretty expensive bases. So we're gonna leave those 10 and then we put zero point on top of that so we can change out whatever we want quickly. So setups that need to be used, so occasionally that doesn't make sense to leave them in the 10 pallet pool, we can just unlock the HWR base, pull those out and set it down.
On a shelf next to the machine and then load it back in whenever we need it. We are going to be installing a little kind of gantry crane sky hook thing. We don't currently have one. One of the few differences that I didn't fully appreciate between the MAM and the MX until after we'd ordered the MX was the mam, [00:09:00] you have a pallet pool.
It's a column, a center column, robot with different layers, tiers of pallet shelving, and you call a pallet to a change station. A load unload station and at that load unload station you can lock or unlock the base that the pallet sits in and spin it around it access all the sides. If you have a high density fixture that's got, you know, six sides with two parts per side for 12 parts on a fixture, you can just unlock the pallet base and rotate it around and get all those in a nice ergonomic position facing you to load and unload material.
And then you have to relock it to the zero position before the robot will pick it up and put it back in the pool. On the MX series, the pallets in the pool can't be free rotated. They are locked in place because the orientation that they get presented to the gripper arm has to be consistent. There apparently is a factory option to make them rotatable.
It's apparently very expensive and only available from factory, not field retrofittable is what I've been told. So we didn't go that route. We are gonna be for certain fixtures that have a lot of parts on them where you can't [00:10:00] easily load and unload the backside of the fixture. We're just going to build a little cart with a rotary station on it that we can crane that fixture out.
Spin it, do all of our loading offline and then stick it back in the pallet pool and reschedule it. So yeah, that difference I was, when I first looked at the mam, honestly, part of me was a little bit impatient with the thought of waiting for the robot to tip, put away a pallet, and then get me the next one.
Certain kinds of downtime, I'm unreasonably sensitive to certain types of waiting, irritate me more than others, and waiting for robots to bring pallets to me. And this is true of like the. Pallet loading system and the brother flex three robot that we looked at. Anything where like you're just standing there watching it and it's slowly moving around and putting a pallet away and then going and picking the next one up and then handing it to you so you can do your thing.
That irritates me more than it should, but. The absence of the ability to easily spin the pallets [00:11:00] in the PC 10 pool is a thing that we are going to have to work around. And we're gonna obviously take pallets in and outta there as little as possible, but there are some that we're gonna have to, otherwise it's just gonna be a hassle to get a torque wrench around to a mighty bike clamp on the far, on the dark side of the moon on a pallet with a lot of small parts on it.
The ordering process ordering five axis, especially when you get into palletized machines and there's lots of options. You got options for. Taper we went BT taper, not cat taper. I know CAT is much more common in the us The big reason, single reason for me to go bt, aside from the fact that all of our other holders in the shop are already BT, was just that the BT is completely symmetrical and you can't load the tool backwards.
If you load a cat incorrectly it is more likely to damage your gripper arm and potentially fling the tool. And so I didn't want to have. Any concern about loading tools in and out and having to worry about orientation. It's like USB versus regular old, old USB versus [00:12:00] USBC. USBC. Just plug it in. It's correct, every time.
Doesn't matter. Those kinds of little things where it's like, hey, I don't, really, I expect we would have major trouble with mis loading cats and we're not planning to take tools in and outta this machine all the time. We plan to load them and mostly leave them in. Anything we can do to eliminate one potential risk is worth doing and especially if you can damage the grippers and then need to get a replacement part and have the machine down if it, if that happens.
I went BT on that. The ordering process lot of paperwork to read through contracts, lot of pricing, things to work out. Deciding on options like, you know, which aftermarket high pressure coolant system do you want? There's a lot of decisions to make. We went with laser tool setting. We went with I think a TS for our high pressure coolant setup.
There's just a lot of, a lot of boxes to check, a lot of stuff to read, a lot of numbers to keep track of. And then pretty large deposit to put down a [00:13:00] machine this size is expensive. And, you know, that was the. I think the deposit on the Matsuura was more expensive than the full cost of either of my first two Speedos, which was, you know, it's fun to grow up and be buying big boy machines, but also, you know, everything gets bigger.
The machines get bigger, the tool holders get bigger. The loans and the monthly loan payments and the deposits and the tax implications get bigger. Obviously with an expensive machine we need to have this machine producing a lot more and more valuable parts for us in order for it to not only cover its own costs, but also contribute to the bottom line of the entire shop.
I mentioned taxes and this varies from county to county, state to state, but in Owen County, Indiana business, personal property tax is about 1.5% a year. Which means we pay taxes on equipment we already own, separate from income the business [00:14:00] makes. We just get taxed on the value of the equipment. And so what we had done in the fall, right after we put the order in for the machine, we started working with our county economic development office to apply for a tax abatement, which just means we get a progressively decreasing discount on taxes owed on the value of this machine if they approve the abatement for a five or seven or 10 year period.
And that was actually a fairly lengthy application. I think the application was like 26 or 27 pages of paperwork and we had to provide a bunch of documentation and it was, there was money involved in even just applying. And in order to make sure that we understood everything we were getting ourselves into and that we presented our information in a way that was gonna be comprehensible by the people who'd be reviewing it and either approving it or disapproving.
We worked with a, an attorney out of Indianapolis who does a lot of this kind of business, personal property tax work for other large corporations in our area, and he was very helpful. Tons of [00:15:00] knowledge, a lot of experience doing it, but you know, we spent thousands of dollars on that attorney, close to $10,000 over the entire process, just making sure we had all the boxes checked.
Now the value of the tax abatement is more than $10,000. Over the life of the abatement. And so it wasn't a question of us, Hey, if you don't get this right on the first go, we've changed from saving money to losing money. But it is an expensive process. It does consume time. It consumed a lot of my energy.
And the way the abatement process works is you you apply, it gets reviewed by a committee. That committee makes a recommendation to the county council. The county council reviews it. You have to go, go make a presentation at the county council meeting. They can ask you any questions they want. Then they make a public notice so that the public can make any comments, objections, or ask questions about the proposed abatement at the next monthly council meeting, at which point they vote yes or no.
And then you proceed to sign some paperwork and your abatement is, is set. [00:16:00] But you can't put the machine into service if the abatement is still in consideration, if it's still in process. And so what happened in our situation is we. Ordered our machine at the end of 2024. We knew we weren't gonna get it until quarter two, late quarter one, early quarter, two, exact delivery date we weren't sure on.
And the abatement process was gonna take several months at minimum. And so we knew there was a chance when we applied that we might have the machine on the floor able to start being installed and potentially being able to run before the abatement was complete, but we wouldn't be allowed to run the machine.
Until the abatement process was done. Otherwise we would forfeit our abatement application. And at a certain point the cost of the machine sitting, you know, if the abatement took an extra six months, the cost of the machine sitting unused for that period of time would dramatically outpace the value of the abatement.
And so we were trying to balance this, and this is part of the reason why I haven't been [00:17:00] talking about the met a lot this spring is. We were waiting on our delivery date. The machine finally got here and we basically slow rolled the installation a bit because we were still in the abatement process and we wouldn't be able to use the machine even if we got it fully installed and ready to run.
So that actually in some ways took the pressure off me for the installation process. 'cause we weren't in a hurry. We were not trying to make chips as quickly as possible. And that gave me more time to get comfortable with the control and understand. How we're gonna do overall processes around this machine.
It also gave my lead programmer Chris, more opportunity to get comfortable with Cam Fleet to build and refine containers for our common work holding and to just get comfortable with the whole thing without having to rush directly into production. So that was actually good. We did get our abatement finally approved in mid-April, and then it took another week or two to get all the paperwork signed and hand it off to the various people who needed to have copies.
But we're now [00:18:00] in production. The Matsuura is fully operational. It is running, and that was a huge relief. I don't find financial paperwork, tax paperwork to be gratifying work to do. It drains me. It wears me out. I get frustrated easily. It's hard for me to push through. I could spend hours intensely focused on something in the shop that interests me, but if I have to sit down and review or fill in a couple of pages, more of.
Financial paperwork for some kind of compliance thing that could take me two hours because I just don't have any momentum for that kind of work. But this meant that we were gonna be much more on the radar of our local government. And having grown up in New York, my general approach is I'm happy to have the government know as little as possible about what I'm up to, just because there aren't that many upsides when you're small to the government knowing anything about you, and the more people know about what you're doing.
The more potential exposure there is to [00:19:00] audits. There's just a lot of potential downside to having bureaucrats in your business. I'm not saying my local government is all bureaucrats, but certainly I would not want to try to operate this company in California or in New York state where I grew up, and Indiana is much less restrictive.
But even in Indiana, not all counties are equally friendly towards manufacturing. We are in Owen County, which is very happy to have us here. One county over Monroe County is much less friendly toward our kinds of companies and we would've had a lot more compliance and hassle. And there's just a lot more rules and restrictions.
So, we've had several of the county council members come and tour our shop this spring. Some of them, wanted to see what we made, or they were just, they wanted to get to know another business in their area. And largely we had flown almost completely under the radar. We've been in this county for 10 years and our county council people had never heard of us before.[00:20:00]
*And as we're getting bigger, the advantages of our local government, our local elected officials, knowing who we are and thinking about us, actually starts to have upsides. The upsides aren't that they you know, help us break the law or, or avoid certain costs, but that the county overall is developing and growing.*
*They're looking to attract businesses. They wanna find ways to, to create more jobs in the county. They wanna try to find ways* *to incentivize companies to invest here, to build new buildings here, to relocate, to here, to invest in equipment here to create new. Positions and new products and build the local economy.*
And if they don't know about you, they can't have you in mind or give you any advice, suggestions, or help for any of that. And so we're now at the point where having them know [00:21:00] about us, I think has more upside than downside. So I've been very consciously trying to deepen those relationships, meet those people, introduce myself, email folks, invite them to come to the shop.
I even went this past week to the monthly board meeting for our our electrical utility, S-C-I-R-E-M-C. As a member of our EMC you're allowed to attend their board meetings, at least the open public portion, not the executive session. But I just wanted to meet the board members. You know, we are a small manufacturing company that is their client.
We rely on them for power. When we moved into our current building, we had to have R-E-M-C-S-E-I strip our pole by the building and put in a new ground mounted transformer and change the incoming voltage to our main switchgear. And they were great. Super helpful about that, very easy to deal with.
Their engineering team was very responsive. Asked a lot of good questions to understand exactly what we needed. It was the building was wired for two 40 high leg delta, which meant you had some [00:22:00] weird circuits in the building that were not usable for what we wanted. Our machines really wanted 2 0 8 y and so we had to have a whole new transformer put in during covid in order to do that.
And they were great. So having our electrical utility company. Know more about us, know what we do, and, and just have us in their brain starts to have more upside than downside. Back to the Matsuura though. Installation this is a complicated machine to install. You've got multiple companies. So we are in Indiana.
We are buying through mat buying Matsuura through Yama. And so for certain technical questions, I would talk directly to somebody at Mons, but the actual installation is done by YAMA and staff. Then a TS cool jet sends a guy out and then PPQD, P-D-Q-P-D-Q that did the laser probe installation, send a guy out.
So we have multiple different people and you have to have certain things done before the next guy can come and do his thing. And so it really is kind of a, a game of musical chairs to get a [00:23:00] machine like this installed. The other reason why we didn't look at the mam as seriously is once I figured out the size constraints, I was concerned that we would have a difficult time rigging a mam into our building.
When the riggers came and put in the mx, the guy's like, yeah, we would not have been able to fit a MAM in here very easily. And even as it was rigging in the MX was incredibly stressful. Those machines, the MX is top heavy and top heavy off center. The tool changer is high into one side. And for that reason, Matsuura recommends picking it up from overhead with a cradle rather than forking it from underneath.
But we didn't have enough. Overhead clearance to cradle it from above. So we had to have our riggers fork it from underneath, and that was so stressful to watch. I actually just took an early lunch and left the building while they were moving the main parts of the machine in. They didn't drop it.
I know there've been a few other cases of MX machines getting getting dumped during install, and I was apprehensive about [00:24:00] that. So I came to rigging day with a fair, a fairly large lump in my throat. But the riggers from egg did a great job. And we got the machine placed. That was all fine. But I said to Ben, my operations manager, I said, this is kind of like watching my kids load the dishwasher.
I'm fine with my kids loading the dishwasher as long as I don't have to stand there and watch them do it, because if I have to stand there and watch my kids load the dishwasher, it's gonna drive me crazy and I'm gonna go over there and change a bunch of it, or I'm just gonna be uptight the whole time.
Watching that machine get rigged in was stressful. I took an early lunch and left. It was a good decision. And when I came back and the machine was placed, I could take a big deep breath and relax a little bit Overall. And we have a whole bunch of notes we've typed up from Matsuura on the installation process.
There were a lot of little details that are incidental to the particular combination of options we chose that impacted the install that were. Not communicated clearly or not [00:25:00] communicated at all. And that meant that there were a couple times where we had to redo things like redo a power drop or redo an airdrop or things where there were requirements that somebody knew about that we didn't get told about prior to the install.
And so I think there is actually a lot of room in. In impr for improving the communication leading up to especially if you're a first time buyer of this kind of machine rigging in and having installed a second Matsuura would be way easier than doing this first one because we'll just know what questions to ask.
The first time round though it reminded me if I'd spent an equivalent amount of money on a car, say like a. A very rare Porsche or something , an uncommon car that there's not a lot of around you would expect. A level of communication and a level [00:26:00] of, you know, welcome to the family.
Here's everything you need to know. We're going to sort of give you concierge service and walk you through all this so that all your questions are answered ahead of time. It does seem like there have been a lot of small shops like ours who are moving up into this caliber of machine and aren't coming from a more traditional, long established, bigger machine shop that just kind of rolls with that and knows how to deal with it all.
So I think there are, there certainly were certain, there were points at which I was frustrated by a piece of information missing. I. That could have saved us time, could have saved us some hassle. So yeah, if you have any specific questions about that you're thinking about getting into Matsuura hit me up Andrew at Henry Holsters and I'm happy to explain more in detail.
. Things I really love now that we've got the MX running, I love the visibility into the pallet pool, and we did [00:27:00] actually laser some acrylic panels to replace certain sheet metal panels on the machine, both to be able to see the drum in the chip conveyor and also to look in the side of the pallet pool across the back of the pool, along the robot and see into the work area.
And I just, I love the visibility of having all 10 pallets easily viewable all at the same time. And when you advance the pallet pool and open the door, you got access to three pallets at once. And so for the kind of thing that we're gonna be doing I'm really pleased with the pallet pool layout. The control is pretty intuitive.
This machine has many more, what I would call modal interactions. And I made a couple Instagram posts about printing. Caps to press onto, keys in the control face because there are a number of keys that have to be in this mode or that mode to do this or do that thing. And this key has to be there and that key has to be here for the machine to do this automatically.
And learning those interactions is very different. Like [00:28:00] brothers are really, really straightforward in this regard. And a more complex system that has more moving parts, that has more interlocks, that has more stuff going on. It's not surprising to me that there are more of these interactions, but it definitely, there have been a few times where I'm like, why is this not working?
What, oh, that's right. That one key has to be turned to this position to do this thing that I wanna do. And we're still figuring out how we wanna do more documentation and labeling to make sure that if something. Doesn't happen when you expect it to. Finding the shortest path to the most likely thing you missed is gonna be really important for us over the next six months to a year as we get comfortable with this machine.
As we train employees on this machine, it's new to all of us, and I don't have anybody in the shop who's ever run Met Surs before, and so there are a lot of things where it's gonna be like, I can't get this to happen. It's like, oh. That one button needs to be toggled [00:29:00] or that one setting needs to be changed.
Even just, yeah, there are a lot of settings that you can mess around with that will affect how the pallet pool operates. And just really getting familiar with those and being able to quickly troubleshoot Why did the thing that I expected to happen not happen? Why did the machine not load the next pallet?
Why is this not happening? So lot of little things to learn there. The Mach, the parts have been cutting, have been coming out, beautiful service finishes are great. Cuts are nice and quiet. The window spinner, the visiport roto thing is awesome. This is my first machine with legit high pressure through spindle coolant.
Brothers can't go up much above, I think four 50 PSI is there limit based on, coolant through channel size and overall drawbar pressure. But this machine's got a lot more drawbar pressure, so you can put a lot more coolant pressure through it. And that's been wild to watch. It's also the first machine, first mill I've owned that has augers.[00:30:00]
So this machine does a great job cleaning itself out. And all of our brothers, you have to manually scrape chips that we've, I've never had a conveyor on a machine before and it's just kind of fun to watch the conveyor run. I'm really enjoying it. We have a long way to go to have the full productive capacity of this machine being used.
We have still a lot of open spindle time that we're working on filling up. Incidentally, if you have five access parts that you need machined, we have five access capability available. We have capacity remaining to sell. So. If you want to talk to us about that, feel free to reach out to me at andrew@henryholsters.com.
I'd be happy to look at your part and see if it's a good fit for what we're doing. And Jay will be back next week to record. . Yeah, it's a big blue, beautiful machine and.
*I really do like the blue. It's soothing. I joked about having an orange one and actually somebody on LinkedIn posted an AI image of an all orange MX three 30. And *[00:31:00] *while it was cool to look at on a screen just for a minute, I think if we actually had an MX four 20 sized machine in our shop that was like Dutch, orange, hunter, orange, safety orange, it would make the room feel a little bit oppressive.*
So. The blue is, it's soothing. It's nice. I like it. Anyway, that's all I've got for this week. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you next week. [00:32:00]